Lavie Tidhar's'Osama' was voted the year's best fantasy novel this weekend at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto. It won over stiff, worth competition that include Jo Walton's "Among Others," which had already won this year's Hugo and Nebula Awards; George R.R. Martin's "A Dance With Dragons," the latest installment in his "A Song of Fire and Ice" series; and Stephen King's "11/22/63," a popular and bestselling Kennedy assassination time-travel tale.

Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer who now lives in London. i09.com's Charlie Jane Anders described his novel as "a strange pulp-oriented alt history about Osama Bin Laden."

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's enormous "The Weird" was voted best anthology. With 110 stories covering more than 1,100 pages and more than 750,000 words, it brings together strange, dark and uncanny fiction often called "weird," such as H.P. Lovecraft and Neil Gaiman, as well as a wide range of other writers who exhibit weird tendencies, including Franz Kafka, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid and Haruki Murakami.

Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie" was named best short story. It can be read or listened to at the Escape Pod website.